Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance

3. Do Networks Govern?

3 The cases in chapter 2 provided concrete demonstrations of ways in which networks of actors leveraging the capabilities of the Internet can create issues of Internet governance. We now delve deeper into the concepts of network organization and networked governance as they have developed in the social sciences. This chapter looks at network organization as a theoretical construct and attempts to clarify what this kind of thinking really can (and cannot) do for the analysis of Internet governance. The discussion is especially concerned with the claim that networking is itself a form of governance. We will find much that is useful in social science network theories, but also many problems and ambiguities. If the network is a form of governance, can it replace other organizational forms or does it merely complement them? To what extent does networked governance provide an alternative to traditional state-based governance? To what extent does it provide answers to some of the global governance problems posed by the Internet? Can we “choose” to govern the Internet via networked forms, or is it only an emergent form of organization that thrives in the vacuum left by the absence of other, more formal or hierarchical forms? A critical review of the literature provides the foundation for answering these questions. The Meanings of “Network” There are two easily distinguishable ways in which the concept “network” appears in the social sciences. First, it can refer to a formal, mathematical tool for representing and analyzing social relations. I will call this network analysis. Second, and more problematically, it is used as a theory (or sometimes only a metaphor) of social organization. I refer to this meaning of network as organizational form. Network analysis and network as organizational form can interact with each other in a powerful way, as we shall Do Networks Govern? 32 Chapter 3 see. But this interdependence can also lead to confusion. Likewise, there are many different conceptions and definitions of what constitutes network organization, derived from economics, political science, anthropology, and sociology. These different notions are often conflated or defined in a way that blurs important distinctions between them. To make use of these concepts for the analysis of Internet governance one needs to cut one’s way through a thicket of distinct but overlapping literatures developed over fifty years. We will discover that all of these network concepts can be useful, but also that they need to be carefully differentiated and kept distinct. Network as Analytical Technique Network analysis is probably the most well-defined and least-confusing piece of the puzzle, so we begin there. The study of network relationships has been formalized into a set of mathematical techniques grounded in graph theory.1 This mode of analysis strips networks down to two simple elements, links and nodes (figure 3.1). Networks are defined as a set of interconnections among nodes. By virtue of its simplicity and abstraction, this analytical tool is very flexible and powerful. Anything can be a conFigure 3.1 Links and nodes: The components of network analysis Link Node 1. Barabási 2002; Dorogovtsev and Mendes 2003; Monge and Contractor 2003. Do Networks Govern? 33 ceptualized as a node: humans, airports, scholarly articles, cells. Any kind of relationship between nodes can be treated as a link. Physical proximity among humans, for example, can be the links and humans the nodes in a network describing exposure to a disease. Citations in journal articles can be considered links and scholarly articles nodes; chemical bonds can be the links in a network of cells; and so on. The utility of network analysis comes from its ability to provide a precise vocabulary for describing relationships , and its ability to quantify their structural properties. The mathematical techniques can be used to derive measures of the centrality of certain actors in a social network, for example, or to differentiate between the types and properties of networks. Note that this method finds “networks” anywhere and everywhere. Handwritten correspondence among Jesuit missionaries in the fifteenthcentury would be as suitable as twenty-first-century Web sites as a subject of the techniques. The network model is imposed on physical and social phenomena by the application of the link-node construct to them. The fact that this analytical method can be applied to anything does not mean that the world is more networked than it used to be, nor does it necessarily...